Tag Archives: Gothamist

By now you’ve probably heard about the biggest performance art piece to hit the United States since that time you could stare at a woman in a robe for as long as your heart desired: Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton is performing The Maybe, a piece in which she sleeps in a clear glass box, intermittently throughout the year at the Museum of Modern Art. Swinton originated the piece in 1995, back before most people here knew who she was (at the time, her biggest role was the androgynous title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando).

Swinton will be performing The Maybe throughout the year at random, and there will be no schedule for the performance, according to MoMa (via Gothamist):

An integral part of The Maybe’s incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real—shared—time: now we see it, now we don’t.

Gothamist also reports that Swinton will be performing The Maybe "about a half-dozen more times between now and the end of the year, ‘each unannounced and in a different location in the Museum.’" For those of you that are desperate to watch someone sleep all day, it looks like you’ll have to hang around MoMa a lotttttt this year, aimlessly wandering around hoping for Tilda Swinton. Or you could come to my apartment: I managed to sleep until 4 PM on Saturday. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the museum this weekend.

UPDATE: a pal at Gothamist just IMed me to say that Tilda is BACK IN THE BOX! Run, don’t walk, uptown to see one of our greatest living artists dozin’ off!

Duncan Sheik, the ’90s singer-songwriter ("Barely Breathing," in case you needed a reminder or, more likely, a name attached to that song), won two Tony Awards for his work on the sexy German schoolchildren musical Spring Awakening a few years ago. And he’s trying his hand at musical theater once again, this time with an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s modern classic, American Psycho. The musical will hit the London stage later this year, and hopefully will get a run on Broadway.

The music is all electronic. You know, the conception of it, at least on my end… I kind of feel like, you have Broadway musicals, and you have the sound of the Broadway musicial—Les Mis, Phantom of the Opera, Cats—and then in some way there was a transition away from that. Spring Awakening [which Sheik scored and won a Tony for] happened, you had American Idiot, Next To Normal, Memphis… this whole set of things using more contemporary, guitar-oriented rock music. For me, I feel that’s a shark that’s been jumped. So the idea of doing a score that’s completely electronic, that’s exciting to me. You’re being progressive about the form, you know, rather than saying, ‘Well people like listening to rock music now in the theater.’ That’s not so interesting to me… it’s really important that you do new stuff. I want to attempt to do stuff that’s moving it forward. As opposed to repeating a successful formula.

At first, I thought, "Oh, no one should ever compare their musical theater ambitions to those who were responsible for Cats, Phantom, or Memphis, but I have to say: an electronic music-focused musical sounds pretty awesome, especially given the subject matter of the show. Oh, and don’t worry; Sheik promises a little Huey Lewis and Phil Collins in there, too.

Whit Stillman has done a barrage of press for his new comedy Damsels in Distress, and while he was pretty tame when speaking with BlackBook (he only called out the New York theater audiences for their despicable and rude tendencies to cheer and clap during Broadway musicals), it seems he rifled some feathers last week and alienated some old and new friends. In an interview with Gothamist that ran on Thursday, Stillman was pretty blunt when it came to the other current press darling, Lena Dunham, who tapped one of Stillman’s regulars, Chris Eigeman, for a small part in her new HBO comedy, Girls.

When asked why Eigeman wasn’t featured in the film, Stillman replied that Eigeman turned down the part seemingly either because it was too small or that he was taking a break from acting. But when Stillman discovered that Eigeman was going to be on Girls, he took offense (especially since Dunham had also turned down a role in Damsels in lieu of her HBO show).

Well that’s one of the things he told me, that he was feeling really bad about acting, he was really down on acting. He’s been trying to get a film off the ground. But then I see that the other person who no-showed on my production was that Lena Dunham girl. She then cast him in her TV show so the two people who no-showed to our film are collaborating together, acting. What ingrates and traitors.

The stars aligned last week, bringing Stillman, Dunham, and Eigeman together for a screening of Stillman’s brilliant Last Days of Disco at a Dunham-curated week of female-fronted films at BAM. Gothamist reports that things were clearly heated at the Q&A following the film when Dunham openly admitted that there was tension between the trio. (She tweeted later that evening, "Sh%t got pretty real…") Eigeman followed up with Gothamist on Friday, filling them in on what really went down:

"I’m not a big fan of having my loyalty called into question," Eigeman says, "Particularly by Whit Stillman, whom clearly I have been deeply loyal to." According to Eigeman, both he and Dunham confronted Stillman and asked if he was joking when he called them ingrates and traitors, and Stillman said "I’m not joking."

The Playlist was also in attendence on Thursday night, and details the interaction between Dunham and Stillman:

Dunham responded by reciting from memory a bruised letter she’d received from Stillman at the time and had since framed. “How could you decline to be in my film which will be seen worldwide for decades to come in exchange for the utter ephemera of a TV pilot?” The pilot in question was Dunham’s own series in which she is the star as well as writer and director of many of the episodes, which had forced her to pass on Damsels. Stillman’s deadpan demeanor made it difficult to gauge the degree in which he was only joking but he closed the sore subject by saying, “these people are great talents and I hope to work with them someday.”

Rich white people fighting at BAM! (That’s probably not an uncommon occurrence, actually.) It seems like the three have made up, which is a blessing if only because it’d be nice to see Eigeman show up in Stillman’s next feature as another insufferable, pompous preppy. You know, if Stillman manages to get it made sometime in the next decade!